How can I check if a string contains ANY letters from the alphabet?

Question

What is best pure Python implementation to check if a string contains ANY letters from the alphabet?

string_1 = \"(555).555-5555\"
string_2 = \"(555) 555 - 5         


        

Answer 1

I tested each of the above methods for finding if any alphabets are contained in a given string and found out average processing time per string on a standard computer.

~250 ns for

import re

~3 µs for

re.search('[a-zA-Z]', string)

~6 µs for

any(c.isalpha() for c in string)

~850 ns for

string.upper().isupper()

Opposite to as alleged, importing re takes negligible time, and searching with re takes just about half time as compared to iterating isalpha() even for a relatively small string.
Hence for larger strings and greater counts, re would be significantly more efficient.

But converting string to a case and checking case (i.e. any of upper().isupper() or lower().islower() ) wins here. In every loop it is significantly faster than re.search() and it doesn't even require any additional imports.